Mary Rozga

Mary Rozga

BIO:Margaret (Peggy) Rozga teaches creative writing and multi-cultural literature at the University of Wisconsin Waukesha. She has had poems included in six collaborative shows with visual artists, including Collaborative Vision: Poetic Dialogue, a show at the Chicago Cultural Center January through April 2009 and Threaded Metaphors, opening at the Charles Allis Museum in Milwaukee in May 2009. Her play March On Milwaukee: A Memoir of the Open Housing Protests has been produced four times since April 2007. She has been a resident at the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology and at the Ragdale Foundation. Her poems and essays have also appeared in many literary journals, including Main Street Rag, Out of Line,Blue Mesa Review, Apple Valley Review, Passager, and Wisconsin Magazine of History.

PUBLICATONS:200 Nights and One Day, with a foreword by Dick Gregory, was published in February 2009 by Benu Press, who nominated this book for an Independent Book Publishers Award. The book has also been nominated for the Shenandoah Glasgow Prize. Available through Amazon or through www.benupress.com

Poetry

Family Matters

In the photograph dated a year beforeI was born, my mother, dressed for a party, Sits at the edge of a garden, the turquoise Skirt of her cotton dress flared out In a twist of a circle around her.

No other party-goers appear in the picture.

The trim across the bodice is stark white,Fresh white the vertical trim along wide shoulder strapsBold white the plastic frames of her sunglassesA blush on her cheeks, hair dark, mouth open as if About to speak. You can’t photograph words.

Vines crisscross in the distance behind herLike a giant green net in which she is caughtUnwilling. Unable to smile, unable to resistOr assert her desire to be out of the field Where ripe melon mounds mark the landscape.